Is making vidya hard?

Is making vidya hard?

what anime is this from

depends on if you suck at it or not

Surprisingly, the more competent you are, the harder video games become.
Because unless you're a C# babby who only writes scripted shit in a pre-made cushy engine that runs everything, you'll want to write your own generic engine from scratch and that ends up being a larger project than it would be if I just started using unity.

You have to realize that programming is just a small part of game development.
You still need writing, music, art to make something worthwhile.

>you'll want to write your own generic engine from scratch
Why

>you'll want to write your own generic engine from scratch and that ends up being a larger project than it would be if I just started using unity
THOU WHO CONSORTS WITH BEASTS?!

Because you'll spend a lot of time "learning" a big complicated engine that has lots of bloat and features you don't need.

Why bother with that?
Most games aren't logically complex.
The most time-intensive thing is graphics and there's libraries for that, you don't need a full fucking engine.

Why not use a smaller, simpler engine then? Love2D or even Game Maker?

Depends entirely on what you're trying to accomplish.

>enginefags
loving every laugh, there's literally no reason not to use UE4, Unity, or Gamemaker

>need writing
lmao

Learning those frameworks is often a larger project than simply rolling something yourself.

And unless you are a highly experienced senior developer and work with other dozens or hundreds of developers on the same level as you are, your self-made engine will work like crap and will be barely functional.

>You still need writing
Wrong. Does anyone care what's happening in Doom or Super Mario Bros 3 or Nethack?

You don't know what you're saying.
Stop posting.

you have to enjoy the process of making not the final project, in order for it to be good. you have to WANT to code.

Are you seriously implying that all games are doom and good writing cant bring a game to higher levels than good gameplay alone can

No, not really.

No. It can be time-consuming, but not hard. Assuming you didn't ride the short bus as a kid, you can do it if you invest enough time.

really made me think

Its difficulty is inverse of your competency

I've been writing my own engine on my spare time for a couple of years

>you'll want to write your own generic engine from scratch
jesus fuck kill yourself
the goal is to make a good game, it doesnt fucking matter what is behind if it runs well

Will you code your own 3D modelling tools from scratching? And the sound editing ones? Will you write your own photoshop clone to create your textures?
Will you implement your own compiler to compile all of this? Might as well print your own custom computer chips while we are at it

I'm saying you don't "need writing [...] to make something worthwhile"

Making vidya is easy. Motivation is hard.

Only if you are naive and write bad game engines.

It's more tedious than easy, but difficult only if you are coding stuff outside your league.

>only if you are coding stuff outside your league
Your confidence in my competence is appreciated, but horribly misplaced.

>need to know how to code
this is a common misconception. You dont need to know a single thing about coding to make video games. there are many tools to help you make games, without coding

> You're gonna build a shelf using materials from the hardware store, instead of putting together one from IKEA? What's next? Making a hammer? Fabricating the nails? Logging the trees and making the boards yourself? Might as well get a degree in forestry and start your own tree farm while we are at it.

Creating a game engine is nowhere near as impractical as recreating all the tools with which you might produce a game engine.

Proprietary needs for efficient performance. But usually that would just involve tweaking an existing engine, at least when it comes to graphics and the like, but everything else that's more unique to your project, if you want to get it to perform optimally, the all-purpose solution is not exactly geared for being the best performance solution.

While writting a compiler and printing your own computer chips are absurd, making your own art and sound tools is pretty much on the same level of making your own engine (they can even be smaller efforts, depending on which features your engine will have)

Like what?

Every time I ask, codefags tear me a new one

>want to make a game
>Have no coding skills or imagination
I literally want to die. Not only am I retarded, I also have no imagination.

Making a 2d game from scratch is easy. 3d is a bit harder and its probably going to be more efficient to use an engine like Unity or Unreal just for the level editors.

The REAL trick is staying motivated long enough to flesh out and finish a game. When you start off and are implementing all the cool mechanics you want its great, but once you have to implement menus and enough content for the player to enjoy, it gets boring fast

I'm fucking triggered. There are soooo many fuck-face dipshit assholes at work who refuse to just fucking learn the fucking framework / engine and instead insist on dumb shit like "oh, well, I'll just implement that myself otherwise we'll have code-bloat, tehe". God fucking damn it, fucking fucks who think software is anything other than 99.99% script-kiddie-ing and only 0.001% creative problem solving need to be rounded up from places like my company and raped to death by a horse. Fuck I'm mad

Unreal and Unity make the most bland, boring games ever.

the engine doesnt make the bad game. the dev those.

Fuck off pajeet.
Programming is supposed to be fun and not a mindless chore.

Unreal engine for example, tries to streamline coding a little bit by using a visual coding section within the program.
What that means is that you don't need to write them down and think about the problem in a theoretical way, you LITERALLY just have to connect the dots and run it, unreal will then inform you if there have been any mistakes or not.

It can get very confusing tho, since you'll have to think a little bit different and learn certain ways of constructing basic logic to then build upon that logic.

Right. And I know that many devs do create their own in-house tools for game engines. But that's rarely the same as recreating full-featured software that already exists. It's more like creating simple editors for things very specific to the game. In any case, the reason to code your own engine over using an existing one is to give yourself more freedom with what you can do within the engine. Once you get down to the tools you use create assets for a game, you pretty much have all the freedom that you need.

>tfw to intelligent to avoid taking on an overly complex project that will slow my project to a crawl

No. Coding is easy, just tedious.

>Work at a AAA game company
>All of our players think we're some kind of fucking hivemind that has perfect communication with itself
>In reality everyone at work is trying to pull in a different direction and lines are drawn in the sand, and blood feuds are formed

Fuck those guys over in combatant design

Then you're a retard who wants to be a good programmer AKA a worker drone cuck slave to some mystery employer of the future.

If you care about making games the only worthwhile metric is how many quality games you can produce in your lifetime. Fucking around with engines is cancer to that goal.

the more competent you are the more you won't be working on videogames.

Really if you are really good programming, you won't waste your time and talent doing games.

>you'll want to write your own generic engine from scratch


jesus christ, shut the fuck up

>LITERALLY just have to connect the dots and run it

You still need to know the basics in programming for that to work. Good luck making anything more complicated than a text adventure game if you don't know the difference between an array or a variable.

The hardest part about making a video game is the art.

Coding is objective. It either works or it doesn't. It doesn't take long to learn it at all, and there are hundreds of tools available to teach you quickly or simply do everything for you.

Art is subjective. It's going to look like shit unless you know what you're doing. Even if you're making an ascii game, concepts like design and aesthetic are still absurdly important and the difference between your game being successful or not. And there's no shortcut to learning art; if you haven't been studying it for months or years already, you're not going to go anywhere.

If you want proof, try doing the most retarded thing possible and join a Sup Forums game project. See how long the group sticks together after the programmer contributes everything within a week and the artist gives you a single CG after a month before flaking. It's happened to me five separate times now. I'm an /ic/ regular now.

Everyone who goes for the
>pre-made engines are for babbies, us REAL devs make our own shit
meme gets blown the fuck out every single time. Why do you people even bother posting.

You do need to know the very VERY basics yes, but searching for mistakes gets a lot easier if the code is displayed in such a "playful" way.
It just gets people decent results in a very short amount of time.

>If you want proof, try doing the most retarded thing possible and join a Sup Forums game project. See how long the group sticks together after the programmer contributes everything within a week and the artist gives you a single CG after a month before flaking. It's happened to me five separate times now. I'm an /ic/ regular now.

>coding is hard
lmao. Believe it or not programming is extremely easy. It's coming up with the solution that's the difficult part and if you're a code monkey then god bless that you hardly have to think for yourself :^)

>want to make a game
>only know Visual Basic

This, the hardest part of game development by FAR is animation.
Making a smooth or crisp animation is one of the most challenging things you could think of in terms of vidya dev.

A bunch of aspiring game developers stand up and defend the easier, more accessible route when someone dares criticize it. Shocking.

Making anything is hard, OP. Making a table is hard. Making a novel is hard. Making a song is hard. Of course making a game is hard, vidya or otherwise.

There's not much criticism to be made. Pre-made engines are virtually optional libraries. There's very little reason, if any, not to use them if you're an indie developer. Even AAA titles use them, like how Hearthstone is a Unity game.

Guess what? You don't "know" visual basic. You just feel familiar with the syntax. If you were any good at programming you'd have a solid base of logic you could put into any language after a week of reading a fucking book.

You're using it as an excuse to stay at your shitty highschool level of programming knowledge and sit on your fat ass feeling sorry for yourself when you could instead be writing programs in any language you so desire.

it's not hard but it takes so fucking long to do anything

You can trudge through and create SOMETHING, but will it be efficient? Will it follow good standards? Will it be maintainable? Easy to read?

Probably not.

Writing good code is hard. You're better off just giving it a best effort and get something working, then go from there. If you have time to go back and change something to make anything better, you can do it, but don't die over it.

What do?

start making a game in visual basic RIGHT now

None of that matters. This isn't 1980, we're not working with kilobytes of ram. Efficiency is out the fucking door for anything short of an MMO or a heavy AAA game. And your visual novel or cute physics simulator sure as fuck isn't going to be using even an eight of a low-end computer's power.

Have you seriously not seen the code some of these indie developers shit out? Like Undertale's joke use of case statements? And those games are virtually seamless on the front end.

Exactly, you can always improve something when it comes to writing code, but focus on getting something working first. That's my point.

Hearthstone is a terrible example. The reason why Hearthstone is in Unity was because of how quick they wanted to push the project out since they figured it wouldn't have been as big as it is today.

>prototype in power point
>move onto paper
>then quickly shit something out in unity
They never bothered touching an in house engine. I guarantee you if Blizzard could redo it, they'd redo it. The Hearthstone team itself probably doesn't give a shit.

And my point is that it's absolutely pointless to change something that isn't broken. Who gives a fuck if your code is inefficient, or if you learned something new that you could apply? It's retarded to jerk yourself off over how well you indented a txt file no one will ever see.

>Like Undertale's joke use of case statements?
I'm curious. Got anything to show of that?

What are some major examples of indies not using engines?

Don't Starve comes to mind iirc

no its not the fucking devs claim it is so they can get more money and then try and milk us to death with dlc and p2w crap.

I read that as Cumming is hard.

This meme has to die, will it may seem that way, try asking around indie studios in your area and they will mostly be using an engine. There is a reason for this, what you're suggesting is reinventing the rock and that would cost a lot of man hours and therefore money to make, a luxury that most indie studios do not have.
What i often see with people like this is that they're aspies out of a CC course that kept up with the linux mentality and think that you have to make everything yourself so it's 100% bare bones essential, something that would make sense if you're developing for say a microprocessor or something. Not much if you're doing an actual game, not to say you're not talented or smart user, but you'd be better off not working in the industry because only a handful of people care about that, they will actually just want to get a prototype running with the core mechanics and some blocking asap. I suggest you go into a software developing firm or something, there's where you'll feel at home.

only if you dont know what youre talking about like (You)

Because you know, it actually takes less time to design and make your own house yourself than it does to just purchase one built by a professional architect.

Fucking idiot.

wow it's like you really pretend to know what you're talking about

LOL

t. someone who has never held an actual developer role

thats why its called work, faggot. 98% of the time you're modifying an existing pattern anyway.

Who cares about the intentions? The game has nothing wrong with it. Unity had no realistic or tangible limitations when it came to making Hearthstone.

>Because you'll spend a lot of time "learning" a big complicated engine that has lots of bloat and features you don't need.

Any engine you make is going to be objectively worse than any of the major C++ engines currently available by every metric. Modern C++ compilers make "engine bloat" a complete non issue as well.

Just like autistic self-fellating asshats that that their special snowflake code that took 2x as long to implement over a simple library function somehow makes them superior?

And yet, what they don't tell you is that you also need a will to dick around with coding. Even for the experienced coder, some problems will have no obvious solutions. In order to fix that, you need to dick around and debug code to understand why it isn't doing what you want it to. From there, try to amend the code based on your understanding. Some of that is just trial and error and requires patience to work through.

Each developer/programmer needs to weigh in on whether or not coding an engine from scratch or using something like Unity would be the best approach to accomplishing their goals. Just because you could code an engine from scratch doesn't mean you should. That said, if crafting your own engine gives you something that Unity wouldn't then that may be a legit reason to.

Programming is the glue that holds parts of the game together (music, writing, art, etc.).

>the more competent you are the more you won't be working on videogames

This. There are much more interesting things to work on and video game development usually pays terribly in comparison.

Vidya industry is one where you will sell your lunch to pay for your dinner.
There's no ground what's over under your feet.
Most really good programmers stay away from it

>implying Doom 1 or SMB3 didn't have good writing
Show me your driver's license, child.

This. Aspired to be a video game programmer in the back of my mind, and took on the cs degree meme. Ended up interning for NASA.

Not that user, but the developer once tweeted a screenshot of his debugger showing that a specific switch statement had something like hundreds of cases.

I remember seeing this shit. Made me so mad that day. This guy doesn't understand data driven programming at all.

look at all the hate this is getting from people who have never completed a game. The fact is, if you use one of these cookie cutter engines, you will almost certainly never make a game like no one has ever seen before.

>samefagging because everyone called you out on being retarded
(You)

D-David?

>no reason not to use Unity
no one should ever use Unity. Rust would be better without it.

Another newbie here. Say that i want to make a game with Unreal Engine 3, where should i start if i don't know a shit about computers?. It's a hobby thing, i don't expect to profit from it (since i actually plan to take stuff from a existing game made with that engine and remaking it myself).

Literally nothing wrong with C#. There's a lot wrong with Unity though, fuck Unity.

>need art
Not if you make a roguelike

There are so many resources out there online that learning to program is so easy now. You're just a lazy fuck with excuses so that way it's not your fault.

Unity can have a lot of overhead.
Ypu can get slowdowns on the ps4 even with games that doesn't appear to be that demanding.

>he unironically thinks concepts like UI design, representative choices, aesthetical scheme, and even the way the game displays text and characters aren't important
Art doesn't just mean drawing sprites, you know

Just /unstuck lmao

Is that an inherent issue with C# or just a result of lazy/inefficient programming, though?
Just because some relatively incompetent devs don't know how to use a tool doesn't mean the tool is flawed.

>he has literally zero idea what he's talking about
My friend, do you know what a roguelike is? I don't mean those games that do procedural generation and call it a roguelike; and I didn't mean something like ToME either despite it being a perfectly valid example. I meant something like Angband, or Nethack. Don't give me that crap about deciding which ASCII character represents an objects and drawing a menu terminal with formatted buttons is art. They're fucking tedious and work, but they're not art.

>My friend, do you know what a roguelike is?
My friend, have you considered not being condescending? Is it really so foreign a concept to you that someone actually knows what they're talking about?
I was talking about ascii games. It's not just "drawing a menu terminal", this isn't two decades ago where eating shit was the norm. There are artistical standards and expectations that need to be met in order for your game to be considered on-par, and being able to properly and efficiently express your game's aesthetic is the difference between a new classic and another forgotten dime-a-dozen pet project.

I mean, you're approaching the literal way a player views and experiences your game as "work, not art". That's one of the most unimaginably ignorant things to say about a game's design process.

this is hard to explain

it's a little of both, but mostly it's a third reason: the fact that Unity uses an entity-component architecture which you cannot go in and change yourself. they assume you are retarded and dont let you touch it, though mostly for proprietary reasons. the performance issues have to do with the way memory is allocated and accessed, which is already difficult to control in C# but is literally impossible to control in Unity (and any other prop game engine). iirc both Unity and UE4 use a data-oriented (i.e. very fast) approach when it comes to rendering , but for creating game logic itself (which most game designers are focused on and the reason they download unity) you are forced to use their ECS, because it is the user-friendly and modular approach. if they didn't use ECS then there would be no reason to use Unity because the implementation for a data-driven engine wouldn't work well in a GUI environment, it would literally be easier to just write it in code.

this is why unity fucking sucks:

You (i.e. the game dev) purchase a license that makes it easier for you to make games, while making every one of your customers/players pay the price in performance. this leads to bloaty games which leads to inflated PC component costs and billions of shitty ass babby's first platformer/FPS/physics puzzle indie game on steam.

prebuilt engines are okay if your game project isn't too ambitious or your just a hobbyist that loves making vidya. but if you want to seriously make games or make something really cool like a 3d version of space station 13 (good luck trying to do that in unity, many have tried and they all realized too late how retarded of an idea that is), then learn to code. or hire programmers

I'm convinced I'm too dumb for programming, so I just make graphics and cooperate with a guy who makes the actual game.